FFWD Weekly
Copyright © 1999. All Rights Reserved

Books by David Bright Sitting across from Merilyn Simonds, author of The Lion in the Room Next Door, I’m struck by two thoughts: (1) just how good looking she is, and (2) that’s an alarming amount of salt she’s pouring onto her bagel. Neither thought do I mention at the time, but as Simonds later signs my copy of The Lion with the words "My story is your story," I’m sure she won’t mind me doing so now. At least, I hope she won’t. Other people – plenty of others – have strayed into the fascinating world that is the life of Simonds, only to find their foibles and failings exposed in her latest book. At least partly autobiographical, The Lion in the Room Next Door casts an uncompromising spotlight on Simonds’s family, friends and lovers – and most of all on Simonds herself. Just how much of the book is autobiography, I ask her, and how much is fiction? "I can’t begin to answer that," Simonds replies at first, but then suggests that it’s "autobiographical in material, fictional in form." The book’s dozen or so short stories were written separately over a number of years, jumping from Simonds’s early childhood in a Brazilian hotel (where a lion may or may not reside), through her teenage years in Toronto, to her married life in Sweden... and beyond. Yet it was only upon their completion that Simonds placed these stories in chronological order, and saw that she had something approaching an autobiography on her hands. Whether it’s autobiographical fiction or fictional autobiography, the book is deeply confessional in tone. Unusually, and even disturbingly so for a Canadian writer, I suggest. Was it a hard book to write? "It was very difficult," Simonds says. "All writers cut close to the bone – and even more so when it is yourself [you’re writing about]." In particular, she says, the account of her mother’s death was emotionally tough, revealing an awareness of how fragile life is. This said, Simonds denies that the book served as a form of (self-administered) therapy. "Not at all," she laughs. But what of the other characters, those close to Simonds who find their own lives under a sharp and merciless spotlight. How did they respond? Simonds says she showed copies of the manuscript to people close to her who appear in the book – even if unnamed – and not one person asked her to change anything. But what if they had, I persist, what then? Would she have changed her story? This brings us back to the heart of The Lion in the Room Next Door. Whose story is it, exactly? The problem with standard autobiographies, Simonds argues, is that they present a single point of view, that of some all-knowing, all-seeing narrator. "The mind never fully absorbs an event," Simonds says, "and no two perspectives are ever exactly the same." Consequently, there can never be one fixed account of any incident, any life. Instead, The Lion in the Room Next Door exploits the fictional form of its stories to undermine any such certainty. Simonds’s own life – or rather, her account of it – is left open to question, much like the existence of the lion next door. "My story is your story," she writes in my copy upon leaving, perhaps a final invitation to give it yet another untrustworthy twist?

| Back To This Issue Table of Contents | Back To Main Index |